Assisted dying is an expensive business. When 56-year-old, healthy Wendy Duffy travelled to the Swiss Clinic Pegasos, where she ended her life on Friday, she had saved up £10,000 for the final journey.
I can’t imagine ever saving that amount of money for anything, let alone a one-way ticket to oblivion. At the moment, I couldn’t afford a rental car, garage and hosepipe to do the job.
Heck, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy a box of Lindt balls on the plane.
Her decision to end her life came about following the death of her only son, Marcus, aged 23, four years ago. She had tried every route she had thought possible to dispel the grief, but nothing worked. Her pain was so unbearable, her only way to escape it was not to have to ensure another day suffering.
I’m not going to pass judgment. There are times when everyone has felt swallowed by the black hole of grief, fear, depression, and any number of emotions that are part and parcel of being human.
I am wont to quote (often) Rainer Maria Rilke and his line from his poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing – ‘No feeling is final.’
It isn’t.
Until it is.
Or, at the very least, feels as if it is.
The journalist Kathryn Flett lost one of her two sons, Jackson, aged just 21, following a sudden accident in September 2023. He had just completed his degree course at Cardiff University, and I cannot begin to imagine the pain of seeing a child’s life ripped mercilessly from them when it had barely begun.
Kathryn has written exquisitely about Jackson – through her immense grief, pain, love – and while my own losses of parents and friends have affected me deeply, I do not think it can compare to what Kathryn has been – continues to go – through.
So, I’ve been thinking about when despair – basically, the complete loss or absence of hope – sets in, as it did with Wendy Duffy?
When is enough, enough?
I’ve been to the edge many times, and each occasion is different. I once asked Stephen Fry (very late at night when I was facing an abyss) what had halted him from killing himself when in the valley of despair. He said that it was the thought of someone breaking the news to his parents.
I wrote to him again recently. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find life very challenging now, not least financially but also emotionally, with friends and family busy living their own lives, increasingly with an ever-expanding menagerie of grandkids (and that’s not a criticism – it’s an inevitable part of growing older) and limited spare time. With both my parents gone, I questioned what would stop me from taking the exit door now.
He replied in his inimitable, beautiful and supportive way, and I’ll keep it all to myself, apart from this: he said that at his lowest, he found comfort in nature, and that looking outwardly, rather than inwardly, at oneself can help.
Which brings me to the effing pigeons.
I’ve never been a big fan of everything nature has to offer. I love the sea, the sound of the waves, and feel moved both by sunrises and sunsets. I love dogs, but am frightened by, in particular, birds – a species Stephen recommended me to try to connect with.
I don’t know why I fear them, as I had quite an encouraging relationship with them when I was a child. Mum used to find semi-foetuses beneath trees, having fallen out of their nests (or were they pushed? I have no idea if birds chuck their weak kids out of the family home after birth).
She tried to nurse them back to health in shoeboxes lined with cotton wool and feed them brandy from an eye dropper. They never lasted long, though possibly longer than they would have on the ground and, let’s be honest, helluva way to go.
She once tried to save my brother’s goldfish Horace when he was flailing, too. I’m not sure whether it was the fifth or the eighth oxygen tablet she dropped into his bowl that saw him off, but I’m pretty sure he died of wind.
But back to the birds. Despite Mum’s attempt at aviary resurrections, I have grown up with pteronophobia, which is characterised as an intense, irrational fear of feathers, or being tickled by them. I can’t sleep with feather-lined pillows or duvets, and I can’t even pick up a stray feather floating around my home without feeling sick.
I’d never have made it as a writer in a world relying on quills and ink.
The pigeons that keep coming to visit me where I am currently living are therefore particularly distressing. I’ve tried to do what Stephen suggested, listened to their melodic cooing outside my bedroom window at dawn, marvelled at their soaring wings before settling on top of my aircon units to shag each other senseless.
Then they shit all over my terrace.
There is now so much shit (that I can’t touch – I hate shit even more than I hate feathers), it makes Michael Gambon’s face in The Singing Detective look like a Nivea cream ad.
I didn’t want to use spikes to keep them at bay as they might land on them and then I’d be tending a pigeon cemetery on a daily basis So, I’m using foil strips, the reflections of which apparently disturb them as they detect a threat and fly elsewhere.
It worked. Briefly. Now, I swear, they have hacked into my Amazon account and worked out that the strips are no threat as they now know how to fly above and below them to reach the aircon unit, from which they poop after orgasm.
You can’t say I’m not trying.
And every pound spent on Amazon is another pound not going into that Swiss savings fund.
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